Amazon CloudFront’s access log feature now works with streaming distributions. This means you can now get detailed activity records about every stream you serve from CloudFront. This information lets you answer important questions about how your customers are using your content. You can learn who is watching your videos, which videos they are watching, when they watch and when they stop watching.

Every time Amazon CloudFront receives a streaming event – like play, pause, seek or stop – an access log record is created. Included in that record is the name of the video being streamed, the type of event, the number of bytes sent, the edge location serving the stream, the viewer’s IP address, and several other data elements. Activity logs are formatted in a W3C standard format, so they are compatible with a wide variety of tools and analytics solutions. Once enabled, access logs are written at least once an hour to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. There are no additional charges for access logs, beyond normal Amazon S3 rates to write, store and access you logs.

Since we launched streaming, access logs have been one of the most requested features we’ve heard customers ask us for. We’re happy to make this capability available starting immediately. You can read more about this feature in the Amazon CloudFront developer’s guide.